Only in Los Angeles?

Well, I don't know if he's the only one in Los Angeles, or even elsewhere, but if there's a porn industry I guess it stands to reason there's a legal practice that specialises in representing those in the adult industry. It's a kind of parallel example of another phenomenon I came across recently, Rule 34 ('if there is a social phenomenon, there will be a porn version of it'). Maybe Rule 34a states that 'if there is a social phenomenon there will be at least one lawyer who specialises in it'.

And there is, as I found out purely by accident via Twitter. Adultbizlaw.com aka Michael W Fattorosi of Woodland Hills, California.

Since I don't live in the US it's somewhat unlikely I'll ever need his services. He's represented a bunch of well-known production companies, performers and others including sex bloggers, and was most recently in the news for his opposition to the Low Angeles 'Measure B' in the election, which on the face of it simply required male adult film actors shooting in Los Angeles to wear condoms during on-screen vaginal or anal intercourse - but on closer reading required producers of adult films to obtain a public health permit from the Los Angeles County Department of Public Health, which would only be granted if the producers completed a training course on blood-borne pathogens, and apparently also (I haven't directly confirmed this myself) would have required every single piece of kit used in a BDSM scene to be disposed of after the shoot.

That's a bit extreme, but understandable, I thought to myself. And surely it's about protecting performers from HIV? But the more I dug at it, the more complex the arguments about HIV transmission became, the less obvious it was that it would do any good (especially since there is already a regime in place to prevent HIV) and the stranger the motivations behind the legislation seemed to be.

In any event, Measure B is now passed into law - with arguments raging about whether it passed only because most voters were uninformed about what the measure actually mandated and what its practical implications were. But since it only applies to unincorporated areas of Los Angeles county anyway (says Adultbizlaw) the likely impact is probably going to be tiny. A few adult businesses will probably relocate a mile or two down the road to where Measure B doesn't apply, and that will be that. If you want to read more about the measure yourself, there's an NBC report, and an initial assessment of the implications from Adultbizlaw itself.

Vampire Skye reviewed, and some other stuff

First, the good news. Xcite published a novella of mine, The Vampire Skye, at the back end of last year and it's now been reviewed by BookAddict at The Romance Reviews under their GBLT topic heading (it's a lesbian story). The key bit is:

'It exceeded my expectations in world building, hot characters and erotic sex scenes. I look forward to reading more from this talented author. I recommend this to Sapphic readers who enjoy a paranormal story dominated by a sexy female vampire.'

The Vampire Skye is available in ebook and other electronic formats from Xcite Books, from the Kindle stores at Amazon.co.uk and Amazon.com, in Nook format from Barnes and Noble and probably from other places as well.

And now for the annoying news: if you weren't previously aware of it, PayPal has decided to enforce regulations against its use as a transaction system for certain types of erotica, principally of the nonconsensual and quasi-incest varieties. The Huffington Post has the most concise reporting on this.

OK, so it's not the kind of erotica I write or read, and in principle my novella isn't affected (and nor is any of my other writing): but the regulations are being implemented in a typically hamfisted way and causing all kinds of problems for publishers who don't, actually, publish material that infringes the new guidelines. And why does a payment processor decide it's their business to have a moral stance on what people are buying, anyway? A legal stance I can understand: banks and payment processors have legal obligations to prevent money-laundering, etc. But would I, in my everyday life, continue to do business with any other kind of company that felt it should have a say in my moral welfare? Well, no.

There was, for those who are interested in the wider implications, a similar go-around with credit card companies last year: they threatened to withdraw facilities from companies that 'weren't consistent with their brand image'. I would have thought their image was that card transactions should be as easy as cash, but apparently not. It didn't affect a lot of 'adult services' providers anyway, who have long since bit that particular bullet and use a network of processing agencies that handle 'high risk accounts' - for an additional fee, of course. But publishers had to react, and Pink Flamingo, who publish my Secret Circus novel, ended up removing it from their own website (along with the majority of their other books) and selling via eroticbooknetwork.com, which uses different card payment processors who weren't affected by the shift in US card company policies.

The only new thing about all this is that erotic writing has suddenly come to be seen as part of the 'adult services industry'. Adult services themselves have a long history of difficult and tangled relationships with the financial sector, as a 2004 article from Forbes magazine indicates (there's an earlier 2003 article as well). In the 2004 case a card processing company that specialised in adult services accounts had its agreement terminated by its bank, was taken on by another bank (weirdly, one based in the Mormon homeland of Utah, which raised many eyebrows) and was then taken over by a larger card processor that itself has since been bought out itself by an even larger one. The whole process resulted in payments to hundreds if not thousands of adult services companies being disrupted. Also, here's another 2003 Forbes article about how the whole banking sector blows hot and cold over the adult industry, often with banks soliciting transactions at one time and then shutting up shop when they find their involvement embarrassing. Unsurprisingly, the 2003 article fingers PayPal as a big transactions channel for adult services - and at that time they didn't seem to have any problem with it...

So publishers are now chasing their tails to set up more robust and morality-proof payments systems, and of course small independents and self-publishing authors are for the moment going to be the losers. No doubt in the longer term, new options will emerge. There are already anonymous internet banking companies, virtual currencies, token-based systems and the like and if PayPal and other mainstream companies want to impose their corporate vision in this kind of way, the likelihood is that other structures will come onstream fairly quickly and be used not just because people want to buy erotica but because substantial numbers of people will, on principle, no longer want to offer business to a company that tells them how they can and can't spend their money (though no doubt some people will continue to use them because they agree with their morals!).

And if they can decide erotica isn't something you can buy using their payment mechanisms... is that the thin end of a wedge that will mean they'll start making other restrictions on moral grounds?

Now this is fascinating...

I've blogged before about how the adult entertainment industry isn't quite the seedy operation you might think, because big chunks of it are owned, usually at several careful arm's lengths, by well-known corporations. (Parts of it are seedy in other ways, of course, but that's a different story.) And I've mentioned that because of the popularity of adult entertainment, it's one of the industries that tends to move quickly into new technologies and exploit them.

News has come to me, though, that the relationship between the adult industry and new computer products and technologies is actually a planned process, because major players in the computer industry use the adult industry, albeit in secret, to develop and beta test their new technologies and products. Despite the well-known public position of some of these companies on adult content, they are all to aware how their products will be used and some have missed out big time in the past by trying to "adult content proof" their new products.

This is from a reputable source - the BBC. The piece is "Superbrands' success fuelled by sex, religion and gossip", published 17 May on the BBC website. It relates to a programme 'Secrets of the Superbrands' broadcast on BBC Three at 2100 BST on Tuesday, 17 May. For those in the UK, it will be available on iPlayer for a while. For those outside the UK, it will no doubt make its way onto Youtube sometime soon via the BBC's Youtube channel.

Men 'worried' about heavy internet porn use?

I haven't posted much here recently because I've been busy hunting and gathering words, and then training them to go in the right order on some pages.

However, this attracted my attention the other day: a BBC report 'Men 'worried' about heavy internet porn use'. Apparently 'A quarter of men aged 18-24 are worried about the amount of porn they are watching on the internet, new research suggests. Heavy users in the study were much more likely to report problems with their jobs, relationships and sex lives.' The research was conducted jointly by the BBC and the Portman Clinic for the report.

The issue of 'being worried' by the amount of porn they're consuming was based on self-reports of worrying about this, though the actual amount of porn these people watched was presumably variable.

The BBC quotes Jason Dean, a counsellor who runs a website for online sex addicts, as saying of his clients: "It used to be mainly middle-aged single guys but now I get more contact from women, teenagers and people in their 20s."

This report is interesting at a number of levels, mostly to do with questions the news report doesn't address (and the full study, incidentally, doesn't seem to have appeared on the Portman Clinic's website).

How and why, exactly, are people (okay, men) coming to use pornography at a level they consider worrying? I can imagine several dynamics at work. For example, the stress involved in everyday life and worrying about a job can make someone more withdrawn, less able to cope with others, more likely to use porn as a substitute for social interaction, and the visual stimulation becoming more 'real' than any actual relationship. But then I was brought up on a mixed diet of Frankfurt School philosophy and poststructuralist thought that would make that sound a reasonable explanation of what's going on.

A more pithy view, expressed by the late science fiction writer J G Ballard, might also be applicable: 'A widespread taste for pornography means that nature is alerting us to some threat of extinction.' Well, possibly not so much extinction as a radical change in social relationships that make porn itself more intimate, more desirable, than sex-for-real?

Ballard also said (in his book The Atrocity Exhibition): "Sex is now a conceptual act, it's probably only in terms of the perversions that we can make contact with each other at all." And this, too, seems to me to speak to the situation. Porn as a common language? Porn as the shared set of social expectations by which people relate to each other?

I'm not quite sure how to read Ballard's comments but they seem somehow prescient and significant.Maybe that's just me, because I used similar ideas in a story collection that should (I hope) be out in the next week or two. And I'll run off now because I feel I should make notes on this theme for later recycling in a story... But any thoughts or responses are welcome!

Xcite best erotic book brand!

I've just had an email to announce that Xcite Books won Best Erotic Book Brand at the ETO awards earlier this week in Birmingham, UK.

ETO - English Touring Opera, Efforts to Oucomes, European Telework Online... Yes, but in this case, nope. Erotic Trade Only bills itself as the adult industry's trade magazine, runs a trade show and seems to participate in or have a presence at a bunch of other shows in the US and Europe. The ETO Show presents something like 24 annual 'best in show' prizes in different categories.

I'm pleased, because as you will know I write for Xcite.